Efficacy of Priming: Evidence from Expert Performance

Psychology, 2014, 5, 1923-1932 Published Online November 2014 in SciRes. http://www.scirp.org/journal/psych http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/psych.2014.517195 Efficacy of Priming: Evidence from Expert Performance Igor Bitensky1, Yaniv Mama2, Daniel Algom1 1Tel-Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel 2Ariel University, Ariel, Israel Email: [email protected] Received 5 September 2014; revised 2 October 2014; accepted 26 October 2014 Copyright © 2014 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Abstract The vast majority of studies performed on the priming of attitudes, dispositions, and behavior engaged non-selective group of students as participants. This study engaged highly skilled experts as well as student cohorts. In a series of 3 experiments, professional chess players as well as non-selected groups of students were primed for risk-taking behavior. The priming manipulations in- cluded words (Experiments 1-2) and pictures (Experiment 3). The results showed that priming was roughly effective to the same extent with experts and non-experts. We conclude that experts are not immune of the influence of priming—their high motivation and domain-specific performance notwithstanding. Keywords Priming, Experts, Chess, Risk-Taking 1. Introduction Much pertinent research in the domain of priming is sustained by the notion of unconscious motivation and action [see (Forster & Liberman, 2007) for review]. This notion, of course, is an old one, widely popularized by the work of Sigmund Freud (e.g., 1901, 1920). However, for all its rich ramifications, the old unconscious has proved difficult to capture in a rigorous fashion. In contrast, the new unconscious unraveled within social cognition is grounded in functional contexts and is tractable experimentally. The new unconscious nonetheless shares two important assumptions with the old one. First, the causal sources of a person’s behavior often occur outside of the person’s intention or awareness. Second, these causal effects exhibit themselves in an automatic fashion. Taking advantage of the empirical verifiability of the new unconscious, our goal in this study was to test for its limits, namely, the conditions under which priming effects might no longer observed. How to cite this paper: Bitensky, I., Mama, Y., & Algom, D. (2014). Efficacy of Priming: Evidence from Expert Performance. Psychology, 5, 1923-1932. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/psych.2014.517195 I. Bitensky et al. In the typical priming study, the relevant mental substrate is activated in an unobtrusive manner and the automatic expressions of this activation are then tested in a subsequent phase. Employing this methodology, a wide variety of behaviors has been activated without the person’s intent, spanning the gamut from rude action (Bargh et al., 1996) to walking speed (Bargh et al., 1996) to aggression (Mussweiler & Forster, 2000) to competitive- ness (Kay et al., 2004) to political behavior (Hassin et al. 2007) to social warmth (Bargh & Shalev, 2011) or to risk taking (Erb et al., 2002). Despite the impressive demonstration of the power of priming, existing research is limited in one important aspect. The majority of existing studies tested fairly routine behaviors such as walking, playing games, solving puz- zles, or filling out questionnaires. Expert performance entailing mastery of (uncommon) skills has rarely been tested. It is moot whether the influence of priming reaches beyond everyday attitudes and behaviors onto the realm of highly practiced skilled behavior. The goal of the present study was to probe the boundaries of priming through the assessment of its influence (or lack thereof) on expert performance. For expert performance, we tested chess moves by professional players. For unconscious activation, we primed risk taking on the board. 2. Unconscious Automatic Activation of Risk Taking The idea of priming risk-taking seems puzzling at first glance. In order to be effective, risk-taking should be deployed in an adept manner. Deployment should be sensitive to changes in the environment (mainly to the moves by the opponent) and also to changes the person’s own mental resources. Risk-taking must be flexible in order to achieve the desired future state (winning the game), whether consciously or unconsciously. However, as we also recounted, primed action is also unconscious and automatic. Can risk-taking be flexible and automatic at the same time? Notably, Hassin et al. (2009) have shown that automatic goal pursuit can be flexible without ne- cessary mandating conscious control. Risk-taking can be considered thus as an extreme form of unconscious automatic goal pursuit. People often take risky choices in order to achieve an important goal. In the research by Erb et al. (2002), the initial task for the participants was judging the frequency of occurrence of words in the language. Two groups were presented each with a set of 15 words. Interspersed within each set were 8 experimental words associated with risk. In the “risk-taking” group, 4 of the 8 experimental words had positive connotations with risk-seeking and 4 had negative connotations with risk-avoidance. In the “risk-avoidance” group, 4 of the 8 experimental words had negative connotations with risk-seeking and 4 had positive connotations with risk-avoidance. These unobtrusive manipulations presumably activated the respective mental states (without awareness) of the participants. In the second task, meant to observe any effects of the activated mental states, the participants indicated their preference for risky versus safe options with respect to brief stories entailing various scenarios. Predictably enough, the participants subjected to priming of risk-taking exhibited a preponderance of risky choices, whereas those in the “risk-avoidance” group gravitated toward taking the safe options. In the present study, we took advantage of the methods of Erb et al. to prime risk taking and risk avoidance by expert chess players. Are experts prone to priming? 3. Expert Performance Despite its importance in theory and practice alike, a consensual definition of the concept of expert within social cognition does not exist. Paraphrasing William James on attention, everyone knows who an expert is. The problem is pinpointing those properties that make a person one. The following tautology illustrates the theoretical difficulty: “An expert is someone who carries out a specified set of tasks expertly” (Weiss & Shanteau, 2003: p. 104). Espousing James, everyone knows the expert when she or he needs one—from the star surgeon to the ex- perienced pilot to the judge of Olympic gymnastics. For some of these tasks, no measurable standard exists. One cannot be fully confident that the judges in the gymnastic contest accurately selected the most artistically valua- ble performer. Ignoring theory for the moment, some features of expertise enjoy a fairly wide empirical support (Gobet & Simon, 1996; Gobet & Campitelli, 2007; Weiss & Shanteau, 2003). First, expertise is domain specific. Chess champions do not appear to exhibit extraordinary performance in various cognitive areas apart from their genius in chess (Chase & Simon, 1973). Second, the relevant skills are so well-practiced that expert performance often becomes automatic (Shiffrin & Shneider, 1977). Third, commensurate with the previous characteristics, experts 1924 I. Bitensky et al. are often better than novices at ignoring task-irrelevant information (Shanteau, 1992). Fourth, experts make use of efficient thinking strategies to attain superior performance (Shanteau, 1992). Again, for all the outstanding problems of definition, identifying experts in natural settings does not pose too great a problem. Because expertise is domain specific, there are people who are considered by their peers to be the best on their tasks. Following Shanteau (1992: p. 255) an expert is identified by “consensual acclamation.” In some fields of expertise, performance can be measured in an objective fashion and the experts are those indi- viduals who surpass a good standard, which is a universally accepted outcome measure. Operational definition of experts is easier in those domains in which an internationally recognized scale of professional capability exist. Chess performance belongs to this category due to the international Elo rating list (Elo, 1978), which rank-or- ders professional players. This short review already makes it clear that professional chess players comprise a well-defined group of experts. Chess is actually the best and most widely agreed upon example of expertise, the least controversial one in the entire literature (cf. de Groot & Gobet, 1996). In the words of Simon & Chase (1973), “Chess offers cognitive scientists an ideal task environment for the study of…skilled performance.” It is for this reason that we elected to examine chess decisions (risky versus safe) by professional chess players. Does standard priming procedure affect experts? 4. Chess Cognition Expertise is readily demonstrated in the game of chess. In a classic research, de Groot (1946/1965) found that expert chess players identified the best moves during their first perception of the chess position. The fast recognition meant that grandmasters were able to focus on the key features of the position within a short time window and subsequently take advantage of their superior recognition process. de Groot (1946/1965)

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